Twimi

You might remember that like a 100 years ago I posted a small snippet of code showing you how to post Twitter updates using nothing but curl. Well, I took that snippet of code, polished it up a bit and re-branded it as Twimi and posted it on Google Code under GPL. I know, I know – the script proper is like 3 lines long and it doesn’t really do anything other than calling curl. I’m pretty sure you could whip up a way better script like 5 minutes. Why the hell would I put up something so trivial up there?

Well, for one I noticed that other people did the same thing. Both ktwitter and ZenTwitter are similarly simple, and yet they show up as “Linux Apps” on the Twitter Fan Wiki. Both scripts seem no more complex than what I wrote so why the hell not call my script an “twitter client app”?

The thing is that if you have a twitter client project which has it’s own website you can request a custom source parameter for it. So you can sort of brand it. Previously every time I posted using my script, the twitt showed up as “from web”. Now, it says “from twimi” and links to the google code page for the project which is a nice touch. So I pretty much uploaded it up there just to get that custom link underneath my twitts every once in a while. :)

The second reason for posting it there is perhaps some sort of small glimmer of hope that some shell scripting guru will be willing to contribute to it and add new cool features to it. Right now it is very simple an minimalistic. It is a starter script that you can take and modify to make your own curl based client. I’m not going to post the code here because you can just easily browse it on the project page. It’s only about 60 lines of code, not counting the comments, and GPL boilerplate. If you want to contribute let me know and I’ll add you to the project and you can hack away at it and perhaps the thing will grow on it’s own. I don’t really care for the direction we take it in. I don’t care if it grows a front end of some sort, or if you decide to toss curl in favor of something else.

I know this is not a real project. But, everyone knows a little bash, right? And everyone can write a better script than this in 5 minutes or less, right? So just do it!

@Fr3d: Fixed – I’m storing passwords in base64. The update is in the repo, and new script is available for download. Thanks for the tip.

@Dr. Azrael Tod: Heh, blt actually looks much more complicated than twim – there is probably a solid chunk of C code involved in it. Also the focus is different – they actually display tweets from friends you follow. Twimi does not do that.

[quote comment=”10130″]
Btw, did you quit Twitter like apps altogether, or did you simply switch to another service? If so, which one?[/quote]

I basically quick Twitter-like programs. I couldn’t get any of my IRL friends to use it, so I lost my interest. The closest thing I use is the What are you doing now? on Facebook, which does the same thing–its the way Twitter should be. But I only use my Facebook account for IRL people.

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